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I was attending a party of some sort. Maybe a diplomatic reception. In a large well-appointed room full of people and din. Everyone was talking. In French. There were tables and chairs but all were standing -- over at the bar or picking and choosing off the buffet in the most careful, cultivated way, à la française. Elegant.

In the room the women come and go talking of . . . Marcel Marceau. Hands are flying everywhere; the French are not among the hand-mute peoples. I'd stepped into a foreign film (Godard? Truffaut?) but one sans subtitles. The film kept changing from black-and-white to color -- a Hitchcock thriller morphed into an old Maurice Chevalier musical.

The young women towered and tottered on their sky-high heels. Rapunzels were everywhere but not a Rumpelstiltskin in sight, though one of the guests bore a distinct resemblance to portraits of Toulouse-Lautrec. Everything turned into color when he appeared, like one of his posters in the Latin Quarter. The costuming was perfect but what was the plot? A clock on the wall was melting in perfect Dali style. I needed a drink.

The bartenders were Arkansas girls. (Ar-kan-sas. n. The name of an American state derived from a French corruption of Quapaw, the downstream people.) The guest of honor was French but somehow Asian. Vietnam? Cambodia? Like my native Louisiana, which once included what became Arkansas, Indochina was once French, too. La Belle France has many children.

The bottles of wine were arrayed in full behind the bar like a cook's tour of the wine-growing regions of France. Impressive. With due premeditation and an anglophone's caution, I settled on a red -- a Chateau Cordeillan-Bages Pauillac 2006. A little fruity, a little dry but not tart, not much nose . . . but what a finish. The wine quieted the din. Slightly.

After a sip of wine, or two or three, I spotted my late wife far across the room; she always wanted to speak French and tried to on those rare occasions when she worked up the nerve. Her accent stayed pure -- pure Waco, Texas. Oh, to hear it again! Her voice, like Daisy Buchanan's, was full of money. And there was about her, always, a soft, Southern, democratic, receptive charm. I hurried to her. Excuse me, pardon, excusez-moi, s'il vous plait . . . but the crowd wouldn't let me through. I lost her. As in my other dreams.

I was resigned to it by now. "In any case," as Jay Gatsby would say, "it was just personal." But one day, or one night, I'll make it to her side again. If they'll just let me up from the underworld to visit.

I try to fit in, chatting with the few familiar faces. My hostess explains that she's from Strasbourg and had married an American. Funny, she doesn't look as if she were from Alsace, that is, square-jawed, round-faced, German. She was born in North Africa, she says. Algérie française? Yes, she explains. Her grandfather had migrated there from Franz Josef's tolerant old Austro-Hungarian empire and house of nations. She'd studied Greek and Latin at university, she says, which explains why she could fit in anywhere. Even here, in this distant outpost of the French disapora.

At one point, she recalls, she'd run a little theater not far from the Arc de Triomphe -- near the Place Charles de Gaulle, named, as she puts it, for the man who gave Algeria away. The way she phrases it brings to mind those of us who remember Jimmy Carter's giving away our canal in Panama. Love and possession never quite cease.

My own grandmother had left Paris just in time -- she arrived in this country and refuge August 31, 1939, a day before the Second World Calamity broke out. Perfect timing for an aging Jewess. In the chaos after the First War, she'd made it to Paris in time to get out barely before the Second. She'd left two daughters behind, my mother's sisters, whom she would never see again. They disappeared early in the war, along with the thousands of others picked up by the gendarmerie in July of 1942 and herded into the Velodrome. They would be handed over to the Germans for Resettlement in the East, i.e., Auschwitz. The Reichsbahn collected the equivalent of a third-class ticket for every Jew packed into a boxcar and sent to the Last Stop. Like good Germans, the SS kept meticulous records.

I heard my grandmother scream just once from the back bedroom when she got the news about her daughters, my aunts. The sound seemed to last forever. Like a siren. And then it was over. To a puzzled little boy, it was unending. I still hear it.

One of my mother's sisters was named Temya, the one who had looked after her during the First War, and now I have a niece named for her. The remembered picture of a dark, brooding Temya in a lost old scrapbook has become the smiling, always cheerful Tammy who now lives deep in the heart of Texas -- a very American transformation . . . .

Goodness. One glass of good wine and I'm out of it, afloat on a sea of memories and family stories. I step into the foyer to find somewhere to sit down for a while and sober up before I get behind the wheel again. But the surreal dream goes on. Pictures appear on the wall. Apparently of some sort of groundbreaking. It's a snapshot of dignitaries digging into the dirt with what appear to be shovel-sized forks. Dali would have liked it.

Then it hits me. This is no dream. This party is for the visiting French consul general, M. Sujiro Seam. He's a charming young man, being French. Enchanté. And this is the new Pulaski Tech Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management Institute, which is situated about where Little Rock descends into the Dantean vision of urban sprawl outside Benton, Ark.

But now it's time to get back on the access road and then on to what's called reality. Thank you very much, I've had a nice time. Bonsoir, bonne soirée, bonne nuit . . . and y'all hurry back. Out on the interstate four lanes of traffic are hurtling by like accidents waiting to happen. At high speed. The dream is definitely over. Or maybe it's just begun.